3 steps to a personalized gift that isn’t tacky

We’ve all seen them, the personalized gifts that are full of good intentions, but fall short at execution…

When we created Onki Books, we knew that we would be competing with similar offerings, particularly for specific occasions like Christmas or birthdays. So we had to ask ourselves, what is it that sets our products apart from the rest? Here’s a few factors we found are worth looking out for:

1 – The Purpose of Personalization

Is personalization really key to the value of the gift, or is it being offered “because we can”? Some personalized products have a novelty and fun factor, which serve them well. Others have a very specific purpose, like the books that include your childrens names. Others, however, might leave you scratching your head. For example, take a coffee travel mug: whilst you might be happy to have a picture of your partner sitting as a photo at your desk, you might not want to be advertising this photo to the world, when you take your coffee with you into public spaces.

2 – The Medium

Let’s admit it: they might be fun, but certain mediums have just been overdone. For example, mugs. Yes, it’s easy to get some fun quotes or pictures onto a mug, but often the mdeium just doesn’t lend itself very well to the content. Take the photos of a face that are awkwardly stretched around a round surface.

Books tend to make a decent personalization medium, given that they are by their very nature intended to house content.

3 – Handcrafted vs. Automated

Whether or not a personalized gift is customized by hand or automatically, has a couple of implications. First of all, we will assume that hand-edited or created gifts are rarer, due to the human time required. We have found this “rarity factor” to make a big contribution to our enjoyment of personalized gifts.

However, there is also often a creative touch that just can’t be achieved by technology, in many cases. Our personalized books, for example, are hand-edited each time to make sure that the illustrations you receive are top-notch and professional…and this just isn’t possible right now with automated systems.